10 End-Of-The-World Prophecies That Didn't Come True

4. The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse

It's funny to look back on all these positively ancient prophecies about the end of the world and laugh, but it's not so long ago that a fair amount of people were convinced armageddon was right around the corner. And it didn't help that Roland Emmerich had to go and make a disaster movie about it with John Cusack. The whole thing started because the year 2012 was regarded as the end-date of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mayan calendar, with nothing coming after it. Which was most likely because the ancient Mayans didn't envision themselves still existing that many thousands of years into the future, a prediction they got right. Despite Mayan scholars saying the calendar ending in no way suggested a similar end of the world, and astrologists reassuring us that there was no black hole about to appear and swallow up existence (certainly not from the Large Hadron Collider), a lot of hucksters did good business in books, TV shows and lectures about the impending end of the world.